This week’s mystery movie has been the 1944 Paramount film “And Now Tomorrow,” with Alan Ladd, Loretta Young, Susan Hayward, Barry Sullivan, Beulah Bondi, Cecil Kellaway, Grant Mitchell and Helen Mack. The screenplay was by Frank Partos and Raymond Chandler, from a novel by Rachel Field. Music was by Victor Young, photography by Daniel L. Fapp, art direction by Hans Dreier and Hal Pereira, costumes by Edith Head, makeup by Wally Westmore and set decoration by Ted von Hemert. The associate producer was Fred Kohlmar and the director was Irving Pichel.

For a film in which the principal character, played by Loretta Young, is deaf, there is certainly a lot of conversation—most of it to or by her—in Paramount’s “And Now Tomorrow,” which came to the Paramount yesterday. Folks are continuously talking to or about Miss Young, and she, with an ease in lip-reading that is marvelous, takes it all in. Furthermore, her responses are given in a normally modulated voice, even when first she is afflicted, which is most extraordinary, indeed.

But these are just minor indications of the fictional latitudes that are taken in this pulpy picturization of a novel by Rachel Field. For the whole film is clearly an effort to catch a popular mood with a plainly theatrical romance that bears little resemblance to life. It is the fable of a hoity-toity lady who falls slowly and stubbornly in love with the young and rather cynical doctor who is trying to restore her hearing. And, as such, it indulges all the cliches of emotion peculiar to such yarns.